just looking for your two cents. this is a bit of a cranky sub and i'm wondering why we're such jerks to each other here.

example: on my last post i asked for people to give me reviews on a local business, but only if they have had first hand experience with it. the first reply blasted me for not explaining "what the fuck" the business was. why not just move on if you don't know the business? why take time out of your day to leave an unhelpful and aggressive comment like that?

EDIT: example added

UPDATE: the rude commenter backed down and deleted his comment. success!

With local subs (ie. /r/Halifax, et. al.) we are banding together because we live in or are connected to Halifax in some way. That's it. Unlike, for example, /r/StarWars where people who like Star Wars band together, people in /r/Halifax may not have all the much in common. Not everyone will like what you like or hate what you hate.

Reddiquite should come into play here. You don't have to like it, but if it's relevant to the sub then it doesn't necessarily deserve downvotes.

Do you know where to get cheap tires in the city? Fair question, relevant to the sub.

You're very right. /r/Halifax is like public school. Not everyone is going to get along, not everyone will try out for the hockey team, and not everyone will be a decent human being. It sucks, but such is life.

Often times how someone acts when writing on the internet and how that same person acts in face-to-face conversation are totally different. Online we can hide behind a mask of anonymity, whereas we wouldn't have that option if we were talking in a coffee shop somewhere.

I think it's people being judgmental, as people generally are. They just don't have to censor themselves online like they do in face-to-face interaction. Assuming intolerance of another persons level of intelligence is assuming that the things these "trolls" respond to are reflective of a persons level of intelligence - which in many cases, they are not.

Really, no matter where you post, you're still just posting on the internet. Anyone can respond to them, even if they don't live here. No matter where you post them, by asking questions on the internet, you're opening yourself up to negative answers. It sucks that they happen so often here, but I find it's best to just ignore them.

You can be intelligent and be a dickhead. If anything people who are more intelligent tend to belittle others more about not being as smart as they are. Which, in my opinion, goes to show that even if you are smart, you may not be "smart" about how you speak to people or treat them.

Not true, I've noticed fuzzing on on posts and comments with as little as five votes, and with a range of up to 50%. You can tell if it's happening by refreshing quickly and watching what without fuzzing would be people adding and removing their own up votes and down votes in the span of your refresh.

This is demonstrably false in the general case, as any shadowbanned user voting on a topic will cause the fuzzing system to kick in. (/r/halifax probably doesn't have shadowbanned users voting on it, probably?)

However reddit doesn't fuzz votes to put a post at 0, and it doesn't even fuzz votes until a post has reached a set number of votes. A post with a dozen or less votes, for instance, will not be subject to vote fuzzing. A lot of posts in /r/halifax tend to get downvotes before they get upvotes.

Source on when fuzzing kicks in? As far as I was aware, it can kick in at any time.

I'm not blaming downvotes on anything. Was just stating a fact that should be taken into consideration when looking at a posts statistics. Both downvotes and upvotes are added, if you're looking at anything besides the ratio you aren't getting very meaningful statistics.

On exactly when? Reddit is open source and they post their code on github, however I'm not capable of reading it (due to lack of coding knowledge) however I have seen and can easily find threads with more total votes than those threads and have zero downvotes.

And it's not a relevant "fact" in this subreddit. Often times brand new posts will get two or three downvotes before anybody upvotes them. That has nothing to do with the vote fuzzing, it's people being dicks.

The voting algorithms, fuzzing and shadow banning code are not all entirely open source, specifically for the purpose of preventing people from gaming the system.

If you downvote a whole thread, not all of those downvotes will be counted, but they intentionally don't reveal what is counted or how to prevent people from writing bots that simply wait N seconds, or distribute votes among M accounts from X IP addresses.

Most of reddit is open source, but they do have some secret sauce. I believe I read that in their github documentation.

Things aren't always so black and white, some downvotes are because people disagree, some are because people are just trolling around (and get threads like this made about it), some are because of the fuzzing system, some are just PR bots that scrape reddit for keywords they want to surpress, etc etc.

I am aware reddit is open source, and have read the code base. The vote fuzzing system (along with other anti-spam measures) is not part of the open source code.

The amusing thing is that I haven't been arguing (although someone is downvoting your comments, which is quite amusing). My question on source was a legitimate ask, as I do not know when fuzzing kicks in for sure.

Exactly. I don't really understand why it seems some people downvote simply because the content isn't relevant/interesting to them. That's fine, you don't have to upvote or downvote: you can move on by. That's an option. I definitely have a tendency to upvote something if it seems relevant to the sub itself, or if I see someone's harmless question being needlessly downvoted, regardless of my own interests. They're free points we're giving away, folks.

For a year now I've been tagging in RES the people who made jerkish comments, and have been surprised at how few there are. A handful of very active jerks can unfortunately have a large impact.

In any case, don't forget to report truly abusive comments to the mods. We try to enforce a fair compromise between free speech and trying to keep the subreddit a place where everyone feels welcome and safe.

That's always a risk, but for someone like me who spends a lot of time on reddit, it is kind of nice to have a bit of context about other users. I try not to allow user-tags to determine how I respond to posts, and I also change tags. Right now there's a user who I have tagged as "mean douche. troll?" who is actually at +3 in my voting history. Also, tagging users is a very handy tool for modding. It's better to manage jerks than to ban them, as they just come back with a new account, madder than ever.

I'm not trying to be snarky, but isn't most of Reddit (heck, most of the Internet) like that? I'm fairly new here, so this might just be my ignorance, but it doesn't seem a lot worse than anywhere else.

I'd have to agree I usually don't post here because of the reasons OP states. There have been countless times where I have typed or been ready to post something only to delete it because I didn't want to bother with the hate/backlash that might ensue.
I have to be honest and I really don't want to sound mean but to me having lived in different provinces in Canada I have found Haligonians to be the most cynical. I don't know where it comes from, the city has a great local culture and the city really is beautiful but there are a lot of people here that don't like change and don't like anything outside of the norm and it really becomes apparent the longer you live here. Again this is my personal opinion and something I'm basing off of personal experiences.

You are correct. We are an old jaded province. We lack the character of cocky adolescence that I picked up from Albertans. We are attached to our "traditions" (even the tradition of being pessimists). We are just so used to things being shitty that we just assume that shittiness is our perpetual state. It is a bit exaggerated by people who don't get out enough, but the rainy winters definitely don't help either. On the other hand, having the blues lends itself to great arts and music!

I think there are very few cranky people on this sub but they do stand out. Maybe at times I'm one of them..

I feel like the biggest problem is that people don't always like seeing the logical comments (maybe not the right word) when asking for help, questions, opinions, etc. We're all here as a local community but there needs to be a few people who aren't going to hold your hand and say '"there, there. That mean old 'insert subject here' isn't going to hurt you". The world isn't covered in flowers and there isn't always a happy ending. Building owners are in it for the money, the higher up government is in it for the money, metro transit is in it for the money, etc, etc. They only care enough to keep the status quo. They don't owe you anything more than the minimum.

Also, use Google before asking reddit generic questions. Sorry in advance to the OP but see example here. I try to follow the "There's no such thing as a stupid question" but come on people. If you have access to Reddit, you have access to Google and it's way faster.

I'm OK with that kind of stuff. My example was for a generic question: pawn shops in Halifax. That's a Google question. Had it been something like, does anyone have any input on X pawn shop on X Street? That's a completely different question that Google is less likely to answer unless there's yelp reviews or something.

I was downvoted for insinuating the Yarmouth ferry was a good idea for local business and explained why.

Not trying to make too general a statement, but I think a lot of people who are born and raised in Halifax and spend a lot of time thinking about it do get a little cynical. It's easier to be cynical than it is to be optimistic. As wary as I was about Mcneil, seeing him speak about "attitude" in terms of economic growth within the province was a positive thing, as empty as it may sound (That's my cynicism talking). I love Halifax, despite its faults and hope others do too. I could care less about being downvoted and you should too.

Edit: Holy shit, downvotes about rape being a bad thing? Seriously people? Please, I would love to see a valid, healthy, morally upstanding opinion about how a perpetrator of sexual assault is someone to be sympathized with.

/u/FlickrPaul is one my favourite 'contributors' on this sub. The comments are sometimes pointless but I usually get a chuckle. I think he says what has to be said when no one else will. Sometimes the truth hurts even if it's not the popular opinion.

He might be a little more tolerable if he could ever make a point without being a total prick in the process.
Which, admittedly, is something that could be said about me. I like to think I've mellowed a bit but still...

Also, he has a weird assumption that he acquires downvoted from sock puppets/shadow accounts but for the life of me I can't figure out why.

With Locals it was more of a very misguided attempt to assimilate into the very weird culture there, which was really less than a dozen posters that just utterly dominated the board and seemed to shape it's overall nature. I ended up bringing that here as well. It was usually meant to be taken humorously, lots of sarcasm. But that doesn't always work well online with strangers.
I also had some shit going on in my life for a long time that reached its conclusion a few months ago.

So thanks. I'm glad I'm not coming across as much of dick these days.
Who were you on Locals?

Actually that might just be what this sub needs. It was actually people calling me out that caused me to step back and realize how much of a bell end I've been on this sub. That, and coming out of a massive depressive episode. Hell, I'm even done with slagging the Maritimes, something I've repeatedly been called out for.

I wonder just how many of the assholes on here don't even realize how they come across to people?

You were a little moody at times, but you usually raised valid points. I noticed that you haven't been as active on /r/halifax - kind of miss your input. But glad to hear you're doing better, and likely enjoying life outside of Reddit. (I've also noticed the resident homophobe is much more behaved now that he's a moderator). In general I think negativity stems from one's basic mentality - miserable people have only their misery to contribute.

Are we really going to do this again? The thing where you guys create new accounts and start being obsessed with my posts? I'm so bored with this. And yes - I'm Candy, Gary, Radfem, Uniden, Jesus, FabulousFerg, and Obama. I'm everywhere and everything.

It's one of two possibilities. It's either someone who wants to be a dick but doesn't want their actions or comments to be traced back to their actual account (perhaps because of the karma/time they have invested in said account, or perhaps because they as a person are more identifiable from it) or it's someone who wants it to seem like more people agree with them by creating more people to agree with them.

Ha, no dude. My user name is elocin277, or it was until I decided to stop using that account because whenever I posted anything the throwaways would show up and ruin the OP's thread. I switched to this account and deleted elocin 277 to try to make things easier, but I never really wanted to hide who I was. Take a look at my post history, I don't delete comments and I'm not that terrible - honest.

so why is candy_butterpants 2 years old, when elocin277 only disappeared a few weeks ago? Did candy_butterpants only exist to upvote what elocin277 said and downvote those that disagreed with her, prior to becoming your main account?

I've seen some people keep a separate account for... personal usages coughgonewildcommentscough or even register an account, decide they weren't happy with the username, but keep it anyways and just register a new one.

Hi Zach, I figured you'd show up. What would one throwaway do to upvote and downvote? It's one point - it wouldn't make any difference. I deleted an account with over 3000 link and 4000 comment karma because I was annoyed by you guys - I don't care about karma. I just wanted to save the name cause I like it.

I'm going to suggest that you let it go and not participate in ongoing antagonism. There have literally been dozens of throaways registered by people or a person to harass Elocin. Don't make yourself look like one of them when I'm still fairly sure you aren't.

If you're talking about the guy who caused that /r/halifax explosion a couple years ago, he stopped being a mod right around that same time. In my own experiences, every /r/halifax mod I have deal with his been friendly and reasonable.

Oh I agree. I used to have a mostly negative view of the community, and since then it's really grown on me, and I like to think I've grown and become a better person in my interactions here.

It's at the point that, while there are still some negative interactions, and some trends I can look at and say "Yep, that's /r/halifax for ya" it's a community that means something to me and that I care about.

Some people will defend all the downvoting and flaming that goes on here as a part of the greater reddit culture diffusing it's way in to our subreddit, and in some ways they might be right.

But I've always thought we don't need to accept that, we as a community can shape our space to be one where we can go out of our way to avoid all the negativity and be as nice and positive as we can. That should reflect the spirit and attitudes of the Halifax, and the Maritimes as a whole.

He may be friendly and reasonable to you, but I was actually shocked when I saw that he became a moderator based on his prior behaviour. With that said, there have been no hateful comments from him since he has become a moderator (but we know he harbours them).

I still don't actually know which "he" we're talking about, but I don't suppose there's really any benefit to me knowing where I didn't witness it anyways, unless he suddenly starts doing it again. It might fall squarely in "none of my business" at this point.